Elizabeth Costello is a fictitious ageing Australian writer, travelling around the world and giving lectures on topics including the lives of animals and literary censorship. She became famous for her 4th novel The House on Eccles Street, a novel embroidered on James Joyce’s Ulysses from the perspective of the protagonist’s wife, Molly Bloom. Costello feels her age, and becomes wary of her fame, which seems further and further removed from who she has become, and struggles with issues of belief, vegetarianism, sexuality, language and evil.

In Cape Town, South Africa, an elderly classics professor writes a letter to her distant daughter, recounting the strange and disturbing events of her dying days. She has been opposed to the lies and the brutality of apartheid all her life, but now she finds herself coming face to face with its true horrors: the hounding by the police of her servant’s son, the burning of a nearby black township, the murder by security forces of a teenage activist who seeks refuge in her house. Through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man who one day appears on her doorstep.

Following on from Stranger Shores, which contained J.M. Coetzee’s essays from 1986 to 1999, Inner Workings gathers together his literary essays from 2000 to 2005.

Of the writers discussed in the first half of the book, several — Italo Svevo, Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Sandor Marai — lived through the Austro-Hungarian fin de siècle and felt the influence of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud. Coetzee further explores the work of six of twentieth-century German literature’s greatest writers: Robert Musil, Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin (the Arcades Project), Joseph Roth, Gunter Grass, W.G. Sebald, and the poet Paul Celan in his ‘wrestlings with the German language’.

There is an essay on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and on the short fiction of Samuel Beckett, a writer whom Coetzee has long admired. American literature is strongly represented from Walt Whitman, through William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller to Philip Roth. Coetzee rounds off the collection with essays on three fellow Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer, Gabriel García Márquez and V.S. Naipaul.

J.M. Coetzee is, without question, one of the world’s greatest novelists. This volume gathers together in book form twenty-nine pieces on books, writing, photography and the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. Stranger Shores opens with ‘What is a Classic?’ in which Coetzee explores the answer to his own question by discussing TS Eliot, JS Bach and Zbigniew Herbert.

His subjects range from eighteenth and nineteenth century writers Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Ivan Turgenev, to the great German modernists Rilke, Kafka, and Musil, to the giants of late twentieth century literature, among them Harry Mulisch, Joseph Brodsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.
Coetzee is careful to balance the strengths and weaknesses of each author; he is not afraid of voicing a very personal opinion. He is highly sympathetic with the process of writing a novel, and treats most of his subjects in light of this recognition.

After crossing oceans, a man and a boy arrive in a new land. Here they are each assigned a name and an age, and held in a camp in the desert while they learn Spanish, the language of their new country. As Simon and David they make their way to the relocation centre in the city of Novilla, where officialdom treats them politely but not necessarily helpfully.
Simon finds a job in a grain wharf. The work is unfamiliar and backbreaking, but he soon warms to his stevedore comrades, who during breaks conduct philosophical dialogues on the dignity of labour, and generally take him to their hearts.
Now he must set about his task of locating the boy’s mother.

JM Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians Until now I only read Coetzee’s later works like Disgrace, Slow Man, Diary of a Bad Year. I started reading this earlier novel, strangely enough, because in a poetry anthology I recently bought, I came upon the poem by C.P. Cavafy Waiting for the Barbarians. And this made me […]